Changing behavior patterns in a digital world requires support resources and processes. It’s not enough to simply have a suitable set of guidelines; there must be support resources and processes that make the changes and behaviors sustainable.
These support resources could include using a spiral curriculum that embeds age-appropriate teaching opportunities into the teaching and learning framework. The spiral curriculum could offer materials for all members of the school community, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, and board members. Certainly, the spiral curriculum also requires suitable processes for dealing with concerns.
Consider this challenge: list and discuss the agreements’ support resources and processes, and then reflect on their efficacy.
Although it is important for each guideline in your digital citizenship agreements to apply inside and outside of school walls, once you craft and implement your digital citizenship agreements, you still need to contend with how your schools govern technology use within the building.
In-School Use
Even with well-crafted and supported use agreements, you will face questions about how you manage technology access within school walls. What level of access do you give students? How do you monitor student use, and what are the consequences for use violations? How does this impact the many stakeholders in your community? The following sections examine each of these in turn.
Access
Although your ultimate goal is for students to monitor their own Internet use, you will still face questions of how to manage students’ access to online resources. Many schools either operate under an open-access system (one that operates without content restrictions), or one that uses a blacklist (a list of blocked websites or types of websites) or a whitelist (where students can only access a specific list of preapproved websites). Consider these questions.
• What level of access to online materials and websites does your school have? Consider access to social media, file-sharing sites, collaborative tools (like Google Docs, wikis, and so on), as well as unacceptable materials.
• What mechanisms do you use to manage this access?
• Who makes the decisions about what is accessible and what is not?
• Is this an educational or technical decision?
In our experience, some schools try to restrict access to only the sites that the school deems suitable (a whitelist). As many schools soon discover, the prevalence of smartphones with access to high-speed connectivity, and the ease of setting up a personal hot spot to bypass these restrictions, make these attempts ineffectual. To make matters worse, pushing students to these lengths results in the school losing any ability to track and monitor their activities as they circumvent the restrictive network.
A better solution is one that is rooted in the duty-of-care concept, one that restricts student access to materials that are illegal or, by their nature, inappropriate but permits other types of access. Schools often achieve this by using a category-based filtering system, blocking pornography, hate sites, and gambling and illegal software sites. However, these systems typically enable administrators to make exceptions. For example, online auction sites are often a distraction to students and staff, leading schools to block them. For economics students, however, these sites are beneficial to learning, so administrators can implement an exception for specified group access. In a similar way, some schools enable timed access to social media rather than blocking it across the board—the filtering software enables specific group access before and after school and during breaks and lunch. This creates a privilege for students to respect, one the school can disable for individuals or groups if they abuse it.
When you establish the bounds for what students can and cannot access using school data connections, you must also determine how to monitor student use and apply consequences for violating use terms.
Monitoring and Consequences
You cannot effectively enforce strict online access rules unless you have the infrastructure to monitor what students are doing. You must also know in advance what the consequences are for violations. Consider these questions.
• How do you monitor use within your school? What mechanisms do you have in place? Please consider tools, processes, and frequency.
• What reporting structure do you have in place to deal with unacceptable online materials or actions? Is it the same as other inappropriate behaviors?
• What are the consequences that you have in place to deal with inappropriate online behavior?
Many networking and filtering products can log all users’ activities. Depending on the settings, they can record the sites the students or staff members access or visit. They can note the duration of the stay and even user interactions. The log files for an average-size school are enormous. Working through them is tedious, time consuming, and offers a very limited return on time investment for the staff member pouring over them. Fortunately, if the school’s filtering software is working efficiently, there should be very little connection to unacceptable sites, making the tedious process of sifting through the log files even less beneficial.
The benefit these logs offer comes when someone on staff raises a concern about technology use. In this case, the evidence hidden in line after line of activity becomes invaluable. In these scenarios, a single staff administrator can quickly search for a specific user’s activities during a specified time frame.
In dealing with unacceptable actions and behavior, we often see a marked difference between real-world infractions and those perpetrated in digital mediums. Schools often deal with the theft of a physical object more seriously than an act of online piracy. The fact that we describe it in different terms, theft and piracy, is itself indicative of the different approaches schools take to address these unacceptable actions. Schools should deal with the two actions using similar approaches and consequences.
No matter what monitoring method you use or what consequence you have in place, you must consider that most of these rules can easily go out the window once students leave school grounds. Therefore, an effective use policy requires involvement from the wider community.
Holistic Community Involvement
Reaching global digital citizenship’s long-term objectives requires more than what schools can do on their own. As teachers and educators, we see our students for five or six hours per day. This is a considerable amount of time, but there are still another eighteen hours in each day that we are not around and students exist outside schools’ monitoring systems. Because schools cannot control what students do in the digital world when they leave school grounds, it is essential that any ethically based use guidelines you establish have buy-in from the wider community. This community includes parents and guardians, boards of trustee members, and the many other adults that influence students’ lives. Consider these questions.
• What level of community buy-in and involvement do you have in your current digital citizenship program?
• Were all stakeholders involved in developing, implementing, managing, and monitoring the school’s digital citizenship program?
To help answer these questions, conduct the assessment rubrics in figure 1.2. This rubric helps gauge involvement from students, teachers, and the wider community.
Figure 1.2: Community involvement rubrics.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/technology for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Each of these